


Marked

by spinsterclaire



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Gender Roles, One Shot, Pre-A Game of Thrones, Swordplay, Swords, gender equality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-17
Updated: 2014-01-17
Packaged: 2018-01-09 00:22:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1139240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinsterclaire/pseuds/spinsterclaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Young!Cersei and her sword.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marked

**Author's Note:**

> Little dribble drabble. 
> 
> Please note the reference to the TV show, Camelot ("Just once, just once!"). Because Guen and Arthur are CLEARLY baby Cersei and Jaime lbr. HA.

A year after her mother’s death, Cersei decides she needs a sword. Each morning she wakes at dawn and watches her brother dance to the shouts of the master-at-arms. She hides among the trees, crouching in the dirt upon her knees as her twin swings, stabs, and parries his opponent. The yard is quiet except for the clanking of swords and the faint whisper of her breathing.

When Cersei returns to the castle, the sun is still stubborn and the lords and ladies begin to rise from their beds. A plump woman of four and forty throws a hand upon Cersei’s shoulder, pulling her to a stop. The septa looks her up and down and asks why her knees are bloody.

“I was praying,” Cersei replies chastely, eyes downcast. Her septa begins to bark her usual orders – “Wash up and prepare for your lessons” – and so Cersei does, skipping down the corridor to the phantom melody of steel-on-steel.

Cersei undresses quickly as her handmaidens choose a dress among the hundreds in her wardrobe. At ten, Cersei is shapeless, flat chested and without curves, and she does not look entirely unlike her twin brother. Looking in the mirror, she imitates her septa’s voice with a fiery scorn.

“Why are your knees bloody, girl?”

 _Girl,_ she’d spat. Like a curse.

Cersei speaks to her reflection then, meeting her own eyes instead of deferring to the ground. “Battle wounds,” she explains proudly, “I spent the morning practicing in the yards.” She smiles as blood trickles down her shins.

When they slip the dress over her head, all pale-green silk and golden embroidery, Cersei pretends it’s a suit of armor. She smiles.

 

Weeks later Cersei is hiding behind the tree, watching Jaime as she’d done the day before and all the ones preceding it. Her twin is alone today, fighting only the air around him, and dodges the blows of armed ghosts. Cersei leans forward to get a better look, and twigs snap beneath her weight. Jaime looks up, startled.

“Who’s there?” he asks once, then twice more, until Cersei finally steps from her hiding place amongst the shadows.

“What do you want?” he questions. It is spoken without a hint of meanness or trace of irritation, merely curiosity. Jaime is never cruel to her.

Cersei’s eyes remain fixed upon the sword, and when she is inches away from her brother, she glides her finger along its point.

“What do you want?” he repeats.

“Just once,” she replies, and Jaime knows what she means without needing any further explanation. He always knows; he always understands.

“Just once,” he echoes.

He hands the sword to his sister.

 

One night Cersei sneaks into the armory and steals a sword. Its edge is blunter than Jaime’s, she knows, but it’ll serve its purpose all the same. 

She goes out to the yard and begins to practice, imitating her twin’s swift and crisp movements. She pretends she is a knight fighting the enemy on a red-stained battlefield. She imagines Tyrion charging towards her on his stunted legs. grunting, growling. He looks a beast, his claws dripping with a woman’s blood, and Cersei slices the sword through the air as fiercely as she can. _Dead._

On her way back to the castle, Cersei thinks of her mother and of the stone in which Jaime had carved her name.

“It’s our own grave,” Jaime had said, and in _their_ grave Joanna Lannister merely slept. 

The letters are only light etchings but, still, they are there amongst the foliage, and these familiar scratchings are the only thing Cersei prays to. 

As Cersei approaches the rock, she pauses and draws her sword. She digs the tip of its blade into the stone, trying to carve her own name beneath her mother’s. She listens to the scrape of the steel, and it fills the silent darkness with an ear-splitting song. It is the sound of permanence, she thinks, of remembrance and legacy. But she gets no further than the ‘C’ and ‘E’ when her hands begin to bleed and ache.

She goes back inside and falls asleep, dreaming of a golden queen rising from the ground.

 

The next morning Cersei wakes, hands crusted in dried blood and knees scabbed over. The sword lies beside her, glimmering in the early light, and she sees her reflection shining on its surface. The steel sees no gender, no person, and so she is neither girl nor boy, daughter nor sister. Only a swirl of colors and shapes.

She walks outside and finds the stone she had carved the night before. She’d been sure that her stolen sword had left a mark – surely the blisters on her hands were proof of that? – but in the daylight there is only her mother’s name. 

There is no trace of her own, the ‘C’ and ‘E’ nowhere to be seen.

It was as if Cersei had never been there. Never was. Never would be.  


End file.
